The Reality of American Power: Why Robert Kagan Is Wrong

As a life-long hypochondriac, I was laughing out loud when reading the tragic-comic inscription on the tombstone located in the cemetery in Key West, Florida: “I Told You I Was Sick!”

I could imagine the poor guy confronting family and friends and insisting to no avail that what he had was more than just the common cold or the seasonal flu.

“You are not sick” is the kind of reassuring message that Robert Kagan is sending to the nation’s foreign policy hypochondriacs aka “declinists” in his new nonfiction book The World America Made, contending that America is in tip-top military and economic health and ready to take care of the rest of the world. He recalls that the same kind of hypochondriacs had complained that America was really, really in decline in the aftermath of the Vietnam War.

But, as the sad case of our late Key Westerner demonstrates, even hypochondriacs do get sick. In the same way, great powers do decline, both in relative and absolute terms. Hence American global economic power started to decline relative to rising economic players like Japan and Germany in the post-1945 era, and relative to China and India more recently.

And while in absolute terms the US continues to maintain the largest economy — and remains the pre-eminent military superpower based on any standard one applies — it still has to operate by the realist axiom that in the long run, no great power can preserve its military superiority on the basis of a weakening economic superstructure.

Kagan, the son of a renowned historian who had studied the Peloponnesian War and the brother of the author of a book on the Napoleonic Wars, likes to present himself as a hard-core Realpolitik analyst of foreign policy, and tends to bash his intellectual rivals, the so-called “declinists,” as idealists. He says they place their faith in the dreamy notions of an evolving international community and the abolition of war through peaceful diplomacy and international law.

Not unlike your average hypochondriac who dismisses the advice of the medical doctor, these declinists refuse apparently to face reality and listen to a rational scientist of power like Kagan, and instead assume that the US interests and values would continue to prosper in the more multipolar system in the kind of post-American world that commentator Fareed Zakaria imagined in his book on the same subject.

His views matter now as he is a top foreign adviser to Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

But if anything, it is Kagan who refuses to face the reality of current American global power. He also misrepresents the views of Zakaria and other realist foreign policy analysts who believe that the most ineffective way to maintain American power and influence is by continuing to do what Kagan has been advocating since the end of the Cold War — engaging in unnecessary and wasteful wars in the Middle East and picking-up costly diplomatic fights with China and Russia while raising US defense budget to the stratosphere, igniting anti-American sentiment worldwide and eroding US credibility.

Which brings me back to the inscription in the Key West cemetery. Imagine now that the physician who was taking care of that very sick Key Westerner — let’s call him Dr. Kagan — was not only dismissing the dangerous symptoms exhibited by his patient. How would we have reacted when we found out that the medical doctor was actually the one who had recommended that his patient take an health-inducing (and democracy promoting) trip to the Greater Middle East — with a long stay in Iraq — where the poor man contracted the deadly virus that led eventually to his demise?

Military quagmires

Indeed, there is an element of the theatre of the absurd in the spectacle of Kagan, the geo-strategist who was the leading intellectual cheerleader for the decisions to invade Iraq and launch the Freedom Agenda in the Middle East that were so central to the erosion of U.S. global position. He is now lashing out at others for their lack of faith in American power that he had so helped to diminish so much.

Kagan also fails to recognise that the policies he and other neoconservative intellectuals advocated — that were embraced by the Administration of George W. Bush — played directly into the hands of the Chinese, who were delighted to see the Americans drown in the military quagmires in the Middle East while they were spending their time and resources in opening new markets for their trade and investments, including in Afghanistan and Iraq where security was being provided by US troops.

And much of what Kagan writes about the potential threat to the post-World War II international system created by the US makes little sense. The policies pursued by the second Bush Administration based on the unilateral and pre-emptive strikes against against real and imaginary aggressors with weapons of mass destruction, and right and obligation of the U.S. to undertake “regime change” in other sovereign nation-states, were the ones that ran contrary to the set of international rules promoted by the U.S. and its allies after 1945.

In fact, these policies violated international rules established by the Westphalian Peace of 1648 to which China and Russia continue to adhere (hence their recent opposition to Western military intervention in Syria).

Moreover, it seems that Kagan believes that continuing to accumulate power and using it more often is the surest way prevent American decline. Preoccupied with the high-brow discourse about high power he refrains from engaging in such “boring” subjects, like how to fix America’s fiscal problems, to revive its manufacturing base, and to reform its ailing public education system.

All Americans need to do is to believe in their power — and it will come to be.

It is quite depressing to see that despite the fact that Kagan the geo-strategist has been so wrong in the past and helped to contribute so much to the decline in American power, he continues to be taken seriously by American policymakers and the media.

Dr. Kagan, our imaginary medical doctor from Key West, would have lost his license to practice medicine a long time ago.

The commentary was originally published in the Singapore Business Times on 2.21.12

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7 Responses to The Reality of American Power: Why Robert Kagan Is Wrong

Kagan combines the perennial American faith in positive thinking with Eisenhower’s dictum of dealing with irresolvable problems by enlarging them. The resultant courses of action are certain to be disastrous. The belief in positive thinking is especially corrupting to our society because it perpetuates the illusion that historical undertakings and momentous changes are easy – there is no need to raise taxes or call for sacrifice, just let the magic of the military and then the market do their work.

I’ve always found it interesting that the neocons so revere Churchill, yet no American politician, especially the ones they support, could ever make a speech calling for “blood and toil, sweat and tears,” and expect to survive the next election. The scoundrel is one who, instead of repenting of his mistakes, creates further calamities to distract from the initial wrong.

It’s amazing a man who has been so wrong so often still gets a platform to spout his views which will end with us in another War this time where the outcome can be loss of many more lives and the destruction of our barely recovering economy and further hardship on our working class for what a “existential threat” a what? Thank God these young fellows were not round during the Cold War how come we survived that without war, where was the hysteria then. How are we going to be affected by a country that has not attack anyone in years.The Media has really failed us, Truly a sad state of affairs.

it took me some time to get estimates on the size of the copper mine China will develop. Optimistically, it will be comparable with the largest mine in Poland, number 10 copper producer, perhaps 100-200 thousands tons of copper per year. Making money from the venture is tricky: there is no infrastructure, and new infrastucture: power station, roads (a railroad) and the facilities of the mine itself will be vulnerable to Taliban. Unclear how Chinese can do it in 4 billion budget, but they definitely can afford it, and they try to invest in copper in Africa, where security is sometimes even worse (Congo). Actually, Chinese could probably station a regiment in the area. But it is still baffling why USA could not sponsor such a project, or similar projects in all those years.

Robert Kagan is a dangerous neocon crackpot. Common sense tells you that if Mitt Romney has him as a foreign affairs adviser, Mr. Romney is also a dangerous figure. Much of our political class seems to be trapped in some form of delusional madness. The sabre rattling over Iran is a blatant example of this. I don’t have a clue who to vote for in the up coming election. All the candidates might as well be some strange aliens from a different star system. This country is in serious trouble and every one seems to be walking around in a fog.